Francesca Recanatini is a Lead Economist at the World Bank and has worked on institution building and corruption for more than two decades. Throughout her career, she has focused on integrating issues of governance, corruption and institution building in development policies. She joined the World Bank in 1998 and has worked in several countries in Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to support the design and implementation of governance reforms through in-depth data collection, coalition building and multisector work. Currently she works on institution building anticorruption reforms in the Middle East and Latin America, with a particular focus on institutional factors that contribute to instability, conflict and state capture.
She has published several papers on corruption, governance indicators and transition, co-authoring the Building for Peace in MENA Report (World Bank, 2020), contributing to the Oxford Handbook on Quality of Government (Marcia Grimes and Bo Rothstein, eds. 2020), Anticorruption Policy: Can International Actors Play a Role? (Susan Rose-Ackerman and Paul Carrington, eds. 2013); to the Global Handbook on Research and Practice in Corruption (Adam Graycar, editor, 2012); and to the International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption (Susan Rose-Akerman and Tina Soreide, eds. 2011). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.